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Even as we continue to push to protect Puget Sound, the entire effort is up against the fact that we also need to make room for as many as 4 million more people who could move here this century.

And as we do, we are gradually eating away at the Sound's finely tuned water-cleaning system by leveling as much as 10,000 acres of forest every year.

At McCormick Woods near Port Orchard, Kitsap County commissioners promised in 2003 to require builders to follow the most up-to-date stormwater standards. At the same time, they approved what will amount to a small city with a business park, shopping, and more than 4,000 homes and apartments, ranging from big houses along a golf course to modest ones aimed at first-time buyers.

Yet they didn't change any county stormwater rules. Kitsap County still follows the 1992 manual.

That's not unusual. Snohomish, Skagit, Pierce, Thurston, Mason and Island counties all follow the 1992 manual, and so do countless cities.

Environmentalists and some developers say low-impact development is one answer. The state is starting to promote it, and some local governments say they want to change their rules to allow it.

It turns out it's easier said than done.

But some of the area's top low-impact experts say the builders are copping out, and low-impact methods can still work with customized approaches to each project, instead of cookie-cutter formulas.

"It's way easier for those guys to come in and do what they've always done until there's some regulation that comes in and tells them to do something else," said Curtis Hinman of Washington State University, who has written a widely used manual on low-impact development.